One Eye

"[Burns' images] show a remarkably colorful range of feeling and a curious compositional acumen... [The] 'internal perspectives' that they suggest... are refreshingly approachable and unassuming. I find it amazing that although they originated simply as an exercise, they ended up both uncertainly poetic and certainly lucid, with a visual clarity that is characteristically Charles' own."
--Chris Ware, Virginia Quarterly Review

One Eye is a collection of paired photographs by Charles Burns that captures the strange undertones of a staggering range of objects and locales. From urban and pristine landscapes to flesh and food, the visual combinations are at the same time ambiguously uneasy and starkly coherent. Sandwiched together without room to breathe, the images are given distinctive symbiotic relationships. In some cases they initially appear as a single picture, while in others the shots are drastically dissimilar; regardless, the results are always complimentary. "Random Selection" for example, juxtaposes the small orange square of a color selector card with an appropriately matched peeling sunburn. Random though they may be, Burns' choices are clearly the product of his unique rationale, carefully arranged into revealing couples. One Eye is his world digested through a lens, and evidence of the scope of his visual language.

Charles Burns' work ranges from his contributions to Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine in the early 80s, to his story Black Hole, recently collected in book form after a decade of production, as well as illustration and set design. D+Q presents One Eye as part of its Petits Livres series: affordable art books dedicated to acknowledging the wide variety of talent within the comics community and beyond.